Robert Tappan Morris (born November 8, 1965) is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur. He is best known[2] for creating the Morris Worm in 1988, considered the first computer worm on the Internet, and for companies he has founded.[3]

Morris attended Harvard University, and later went on to graduate school at Cornell. During his first year there, he designed a computer worm that disrupted many computers on what was then a fledgling internet. This landed him in court a year later.

Morris' worm was developed in 1988, while he was a graduate student at Cornell University.[7] He said it was designed to gauge the size of the Internet. He released the worm from MIT, rather than from Cornell.[7] The worm exploited several vulnerabilities to gain entry to targeted systems, including:

the transitive trust enabled by people setting up rexec/rsh network logins without password requirements.

The worm was programmed to check each computer it found to determine if the infection was already present. However, Morris believed that some administrators might try to defeat his worm by instructing the computer to report a false positive. To compensate for this possibility, Morris directed the worm to copy itself anyway, 14% of the time, no matter what the response to the infection-status interrogation.

This level of persistence was a design flaw: it created system loads that not only brought it to the attention of system administrators, but also disrupted the target computers. During the ensuing trial, it was estimated that the cost in "potential loss in productivity" caused by the worm and efforts to remove it from different systems ranged from $200 to $53,000.[7]

In 1989, Morris was indicted for violating United States Code Title 18 (18 U.S.C.§ 1030), the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.[4] He was the first person to be indicted under this act. In December 1990, he was sentenced to three years of probation, 400 hours of community service, and a fine of $10,050 plus the costs of his supervision. He appealed, but the motion was rejected the following March.[3]

Morris' stated motive during the trial was "to demonstrate the inadequacies of current security measures on computer networks by exploiting the security defects [he] had discovered."[4] He completed his sentence as of 1994.

He is a longtime friend and collaborator of Paul Graham. In addition to founding two companies together, Graham dedicated his book ANSI Common Lisp to Morris, and named the programming language that generates the online stores' web pages RTML in his honor. Graham lists Morris as one of his personal heroes, saying "he's never wrong."[8]

^Daly, James. "Portrait of an artist as a young hacker", Computerworld, November 14, 1988. Accessed February 15, 2011. "Draves added that Morris said he enjoyed cracking passwords as a student at the Delbarton School, an exclusive private high school in Morristown, NJ 'But I thought he'd given up on that,' Draves said."